After The End
by Waiwa Ayas
Summary: After the collapse of his company, the Onceler is left broken and alone in his empty manor, surrounded by dead earth and failed dreams. But someone is still there with him, and she knows that beneath the soil lies the key to rebirth. AU, set in our world.
1. Emptiness

**Thank you for checking out my story! :)**

**Please remember that this story is AU, set in our world. In order to avoid any weirdness from this pairing, let's just pretend that Audrey is a few years older than she is in the movie. **

The Onceler family mansion was silent and empty. The sun beamed into open windows, illuminating every lavish hallway and showing them to be in an extreme state of disarray. Furniture was moved around, and boxes were piled up on the floor. Vases were missing from the tops of desks and picture frames had been taken down off the walls. Outside, the grass was trampled and browned in the empty space where the family's fleet of luxury cars had used to be parked. Tire tracks were burned into the driveway that led through the fields and down to the road, and the dust from the passing cars had long ago settled. The fields were empty as well, full of yellowed leaves and twisted, pulpy fruit unfit for human consumption. Even throughout this vast expanse of land, the bright sun caught no movement. The only sounds came from the front stairway of the Onceler mansion, where a lanky figure dressed in a casual suit and a bowler hat was sitting on the bottom step, hunched over and sobbing softly into his hands.

He didn't blame the field workers or the manor servants for leaving. They had no obligation to him except through their contracts of employment. If there was no more money to pay them, then there was no more employment and thus no reason for them to stay. He didn't even blame Aloysius O'Hare, his business partner, for pulling out before his losses became as staggering as his own had become. He had always known that the short man with the strangely aligned hair and insincere smile was only in it for the money. But his family's leaving had left him weak with grief and shock. He had done everything for them. He had built this entire corporate empire out of absolutely nothing in order to prove that he was not the failure they had predicted him to be. He had brought them from the miserable depths of poverty to the wildest heights of wealth, and he had asked only for their approval in return. Which they had given readily when things were going well. But as soon as the bubble popped and the fall began, so fast and sudden that he was still reeling from it, they had packed up and moved on without so much as a backward glance. While he had been making phone calls and pleading with investors, his mother, brothers, aunt, and uncle had been raiding the manor, packing together all the expensive and portable things they could find in order to sell them later on. He had been too numb to stop them. And that wasn't the worst thing. As she looked out across the acres and acres of yellowed, useless strawberry fields, his mother had said that she was disappointed- _disappointed_ in him! She had insisted that he ought to have known better, and then declared that Bret (or Chet; she probably didn't even know which twin was which,) was now her favorite son. Then she'd climbed into the loaded fleet of cars with the rest of the family and zoomed off down the road, leaving her youngest son standing alone in front of a vacant house with the weight of a failing empire upon him.

They had not been saints; they had not been perfect. But they were all that he had, and he'd been happy back when he'd been able to make them happy. He had liked the idea that he was the best out of all of them, the gifted son leading them to the pinnacle of success and fortune. But even as he'd grown stronger and bigger and ever more influential, he'd always expected his family to be there for him if any moments of weakness suddenly arose. After all, hadn't he given them everything? Hadn't he? And this was so much more than a simple moment of weakness. This was disaster; this was his kingdom crumbling around him; this was the depths of despair. And in this the truth had come out. Now that he was no longer useful to his family as a source of riches, they had cut their losses and left him all alone. His sobs became louder and more shuddering as the emptiness of the house bore down upon him. He felt like a child lost in the woods after dark. Every memory pained him. Every thought seemed to cut into him.

How had he ended up like this?

In a way, it would be all too easy to blame his associate. After all, O'Hare had been the one who had convinced him to approve the use of the new pesticide on his crops. The short man had argued that since strawberries grew very low to the ground, they were more accessible to insects and rot, leading to massive losses each season in fruit that became inedible before the harvesters could get to it. With the use of the new pesticide agent, the bugs had been driven away and they had seen a more than 40% increase in product yield from the fields. For five years, berry farming had been like a dream. The Onceler did not actually know much about what was in the pesticides. His portion of their partnership involved managing the profits and other corporate aspects of the business; sales promotion, investing, stocks, and the like. O'Hare had been in charge of managing the fields and ensuring product quality. The strawberries had come up from the fields fresher, less damaged, and in much greater quantities. As demand increased, they had been able to raise the prices as well, and the incoming flow of wealth had brought them to greater and greater prominence in the business world. They had been one of the largest corporate farms and the biggest supplier of strawberries to almost every store in the country. He'd thought that Onceler Fields could never fail.

But that wasn't the whole story. Something had been wrong with the pesticides. Maybe it was the chemicals themselves, maybe they had used too great an amount on the plants, or perhaps they had sprayed them too relentlessly without allowing the land to rest in between seasons. Whatever it was, the land had reached a tipping point in the sixth year. From the time that the strawberry plants had first begun to grow in the spring, a million problems had grown up alongside them like weeds. The pesticides had affected both the root and shoot development of the plants, hindering their overall growth. The soil could not retain as much water as it used to, and the runoff could not be collected and used to re-irrigate the land anymore; it was sick with chemicals. The bee colonies had stopped coming to pollinate the plants, costing the farm thousands. Some plants had stopped producing altogether; the strawberries which did grow out of the stems of the stunted plants were small and spongy. Aside from that, there were now groups of environmental activists and public health officials declaring that the produce from his lands contained dangerously high levels of chemical residue, and was not healthy for public consumption. Of course, he had mobilized his PR campaign to fight these accusations, but it was a losing battle. Sales had been driven way down, and lawsuits had been filed. His company was bleeding out money faster than the strawberries in the now-empty fields were bleeding out their juices under the hot summer sun. When it had all come to a head, O'Hare had bailed out with the majority of his finances still intact, and left his partner, the official owner of the lands and frontman of the company, to take the fall all the way to the bottom. Only now did the Onceler realize that the older man had used him- his impetuous desires, his youthful fearlessness, his drive to push the boundaries of what was advisable- to fill his own purse while the company was up. He had probably always known that it was going to crash. Yet even though the Onceler would have gladly welcomed the opportunity to pin his painful failures on O'Hare, he knew deep in his heart that the real fault lay no further than his own nose. He had been too trusting, too foolish, too giddy with wealth and flush with success to look deeper. He had not considered that the long-term effects of using the pesticides might be vastly different than the short-term benefits. He had not bothered to know the things which he'd had a responsibility to be aware of, about the pesticides and about O'Hare. And now he was paying for his stupidity ten times over.

It would not have been as big a problem if the effects of the pesticides upon the land could be easily eradicated. If all they had to do was stop spraying the crops and wait a few years for the chemicals to wash out of the dirt, his investors would not have left him and his company would still be alive. But the problem was much, much worse than that. The pesticides had stripped the organic matter from the soil, meaning that the chemicals would not be quickly broken down and flushed out. They could linger in the land for _decades,_ affecting the quality of the soil and contaminating any food that grew there. The land had been used to the maximum, and now it could be used no longer. He was living in the middle of a dead, depleted earth, and it was all his doing.

He suddenly didn't want to be in the house anymore. He wanted to walk out the open door, through the empty fields, past the end of his property, miles and miles away. He wanted to walk all the way to the ocean, board a ship bound for some foreign country and start over, re-make himself with nothing but the clothes on his back and the gloves on his hands. He had done it once before; he could do it again. But the Onceler knew that he could not walk all the way to the ocean. Even if he could, it would be naïve to think that he could get away that easily. News stations were no doubt fervently covering the epic downfall of his company at this very moment. The entire town that lay just west of Onceler Fields was in a panic about it. Creditors would be coming after him to strip him of the last material remnants of his former life of leisure in order to pay off their bills. He was not free as he had been when he had first come to this valley. His life was now tied to his failures, and he couldn't see any way out.

A faint rustle at the end of the hallway that led to the east wing caused him to start and look up. There was someone still here? Immediately, his eyes caught onto a blaze of incandescent orange, lit up by the sunlight streaming in through the windows. The orange blaze belonged to the hair of a girl in a yellow-and-green patched dress who was standing down at the end of the hallway, looking directly at him with an unfathomable expression on her face. She was no one he had ever seen before, probably a few years his junior, with wide green eyes and a sun hat pressed underneath her arm. The Onceler straightened up and wiped his eyes, pained at the realization that she had probably seen him crying. He wanted to maintain at least a small portion of his dignity while others were watching.

She approached him hesitantly, her small feet padding noiselessly over the carpet. "Mr. Onceler….?"

He sniffled and turned his face away. "The door's right there. You can take whatever you want from the manor. I don't care."

She did not turn in the direction his finger was pointing. She continued to stand silently in front of him, her eyes vast and troubled, like a passerby observing the scene of a deadly car wreck. He drew a deep sigh and stood up, towering over her. "Look, you ought to just go. You're the last one here. All the cars have gone, but if you start walking right now, you should be able to make it into town by sundown. You'll have to find a new job now. The strawberry fields are dead. I'm s-sorry, but whatever kind of life you've had here is over."

He leaned weakly against the wall as he uttered this last statement, gazing out the door and across the fields which should have been a healthy green, but were instead a sickly yellow, like legal notepaper. The girl turned around to look at them too, and for a long while it was silent. The phrase _too big to fail_ kept running thoughtlessly through his mind like an unholy mantra. The air from the fields tasted strange in his throat as it washed through the front door. He coughed roughly.

The girl pivoted and gazed at him directly once again. "Mr. Onceler, you should really go and lie down in bed."

He coughed again, and nodded vaguely. "Bed…..yes. Yes, I think I will." Fumbling with the banister, he dragged himself up the stairs, shoulders drooping and head hanging low. At the top, he paused for a moment to look back down at the girl, with the hazy idea that he ought to say something to her. She was standing still at the bottom of the stairway, patiently watching his retreating form. She would no doubt leave while he slept; he did not care what items she took with her. Everything in this house was a reminder of what had been and could be no longer. Saying nothing, the Onceler turned his back and ducked underneath the arch that led into the manor's private hallways. He leaned his hand against the walls as he made his way back to his bedroom and slipped in through the double doors. He strode through the lavish room and immediately went to his medicine cabinet, drawing out a bottle of sleeping pills. He located a glass of water and gulped down as many capsules as he could safely swallow without risking his life. Normally, he did not like relying on synthetic products to keep him awake or cause him to sleep, but this was an emergency. There was nothing he wanted so much in the world as to separate himself from the bleak and miserable nightmare his reality had become. He yanked the curtains closed and took off his hat and vest, allowing himself to fall backward onto his quilted sheets. The last thing he remembered was that their softness repulsed him. They hadn't ought to be so soft, they were taunting him, reminding him of gentle days gone away…. And then he was asleep, and in his dream he thought he heard the sounds of music and a lively party going on downstairs. He rose up out of his bed and went to join them; but no matter how many doors he opened or hallways he travelled down, he could not reach the location of the happy voices, and he was left standing out alone in an endless corridor.


	2. The Copper Phantom

**Chapter two is here! Let me know what you think! Also, thank you to my first two reviewers. Sorry the first chapter made you sad, but I'm glad you liked it enough to review! *hugs* :)**

He did not leave his suite for the next two days. He had a fully stocked mini-fridge, a porcelain bathtub and shower, and a whole armada's worth of fine clothing all within a few feet of his bed. He spent his days trying to sleep, and his nights lying awake, staring fixatedly at the ceiling through the gaps between his fingers. His mind was running through a million different scenarios and dreading each and every one. Sometimes the phone would ring and he would start, but he refused to answer it and it eventually cut off. Sometimes the doorbell clanged, usually in the mornings, but those people too eventually went away. He knew that he was going to have to face the world sooner or later, but he didn't know how. For so long he had played with the world as if it was a cheap finger-toy, and now its weight was crushing him. He wanted to turn into a speck of dust and blow away on the wind. His only comfort was Pipsqueak, a tiny bear-like mammal that he had rescued from his strawberry fields after he had found him wandering around and snacking ravenously on the berries. He had brought the little creature into the manor to be his pet, and Pipsqueak had always been an endless source of innocent amusement for his master. He had initially worried that he would have to send the bear away to a nature preserve when he grew too large to stay indoors, but for some reason which the Onceler had never investigated, the little mammal never grew even an inch larger than he had been on the day he'd been found. Pipsqueak liked to climb over the furniture and run off with his slippers and steal all kinds of junk food from his master's cache; but during the past few days, the furry creature had seemed to acutely sense that the Onceler was not in the mood to play. Instead, the bear spent a lot of time curled up next to the silent human as he lay on the bed, and it helped; it was good to know that there was at least one creature in the world who still wanted to be near him.

Eventually, though, he knew that he could not hide in his room like a frightened child anymore. Besides, he was out of food and marshmallows. On the third day he put on his business suit, found his coal-black stovepipe hat, and holding Pipsqueak under one arm, he pried open his door and prepared himself to face the utter ruin of his mansion that lay beyond.

But there was no ruin to be found. With wide blue eyes, he wandered down hallways that were clear and clean. It wasn't that things had been taken away- on the contrary, everything had been put back in its place. All the empty boxes were gone, and the pictures that remained had been straightened on the walls. The curtains were pulled shut, as if someone had closed them last night and hadn't gotten around to opening them yet. Pipsqueak chirruped in approval as the Onceler gaped. He hadn't thought that anyone had been in this manor since that last person had left three days ago. But the manor was without a doubt as clean and orderly as it had been back when he had employed a whole list of maids. For a few fleeting moments, he dared to hope that his mother might have come back again, might be waiting downstairs for him at this very moment- but in his heart, he knew that this was not her handiwork. She hadn't cleaned so much as a teacup ever since they had become rich, and she wouldn't be about to start now. Curiously, the Onceler set out in search of the mysterious cleaning person, letting Pipsqueak down to walk beside his ankles.

Soon, however, he ran across a different problem. Both he and his pet were considerably hungry, having subsisted off of nothing but fridge-cooled foods and marshmallows for the past two days. He had not felt much like eating when he had left his suite, but all of the walking he'd been doing was starting to affect him. Pipsqueak whined, and he picked the bear up again, glancing confusedly down the hallway. A second problem, which he hadn't realized until now, was that he really had no idea how to find his way to the manor's kitchen. This seemed a bit ridiculous, even to him, but he had never once cooked for himself since moving in here. He had always had chefs to cook his meals, and serving people to bring them up to his dining hall or his office. He was not familiar at all with the parts of the manor which were devoted to the lives of the servants. A third problem, he realized, was that even if he did manage to stumble upon the kitchens, the only kind of food he knew how to cook was pancakes. He rocked Pipsqueak back and forth in his arms as he tried to calculate how long one could expect to survive on pancakes and water. Going to a restaurant in town was out of the question. There was no way he could show his face there ever again. So many people had lost their jobs because of the failure of his company. He wondered if the town would even survive.

He brooded over this for a while, wandering the empty hallways and thinking back on his mistakes. Suddenly, he heard a faint ringing from downstairs. Pipsqueak perked up in his arms, and he listened harder. At first he thought it was the telephone, but this ringing had a different tone. He heard it again, and detected that it was coming from the ground floor level, from somewhere near the front staircase. He knew how to get there, at least. He held the little bear closer to stop his wriggling, and cautiously made his way down several more hallways until he was at the top of the staircase. By that time, the ringing had stopped. He peered over the banister and saw no one. Slowly, the Onceler descended the stairs and opened the front door to peer out. There was no one there, either. He closed it again and turned in a full circle, scanning the floor-level hallways for signs of anything unusual. Every door was closed except for one. At the beginning of the south hallway, the door which led to the room that housed his grand banquet table was hanging halfway ajar.

Curiously, the Onceler approached it and ducked his upper body inside. The sight of the great empty table where so many people had once sat to eat with him was saddening, and he had to blink his eyes several times before pushing open the door and tiptoeing in completely. He flipped on the light switch, and saw no movement within the huge room. However, the air smelled savory and sweet, and Pipsqueak seemed excited again. The Onceler's eyes swept over the empty table until they came to rest at the very end. In front of his own high-backed chair, there was….something. He put the little bear down and allowed him to lead the way across the huge length of the table. At the end, he halted mid-step and blinked in confusion. In front of his table-place, there was a plate with a grilled-cheese sandwich upon it, a glass full of what looked to be apple juice, and a smaller platter stacked with round, red strawberries. There was a folded napkin to the side, and nothing else.

He turned and looked in every direction again, brushing the hair out of his eyes. "Hello?" he called, and no one answered. Pipsqueak was trying to jump up on the table to get at the strawberries, and he had to admit, his pet had the right idea. He decided to eat the sandwich before it grew cold, and then continue his search for the mysterious cleaning-and-now-apparently-cooking-person. He lowered the plate of strawberries to the floor for Pipsqueak, and settled into his chair. He felt much too small in the cavernous room, something which had never happened before. However, the sandwich was hot and delicious, and he felt less anxious as he ate it. At least his food problem was temporarily solved. When he was finished, he stood and cleared the dishes before remembering that he didn't know the way to the kitchen. He stacked them neatly on the table's edge and picked up his pet, determined to dedicate himself anew to uncovering the identity of his mysterious visitor.

It was strange to walk the hallways with the knowledge that he was not alone in the manor. He rounded every corner expecting to be met by another person, but he was always disappointed. Where could they be, and why were they operating so surreptitiously? He found nothing, but at the very least, the pursuit was a suitable distraction from the myriad of darker things clamoring for his attention. He returned to his room worn out and confused, and settled in for a nap.

He was awakened by the telephone. For a brief moment, he almost answered it without thinking, but then he remembered himself and snatched his hand away as if it were a spider. The caller could leave a message on the machine downstairs. He probably had at least 200 messages by now. Sighing, he leaned back in his bed as the obnoxious ringing abated. For a few moments, there was utter silence, and he wondered if this was what the rest of his life was going to be like- silence, coldness, fear of the light, bottled-up regrets. Pipsqueak pressed his black nose further into his master's shoulder, and the Onceler found that he somewhat envied his little pet. He had never had much- he had never lost much. He was content with just a plate of strawberries and a warm place to sleep. He petted the bear softly, and was just about to fall asleep himself when he heard it again. Not the ringing of the telephone, but the softer, higher-pitched sound of the mysterious bell. Instantly Pipsqueak was over at the door, scratching to go out. The Onceler threw open the door and followed his pet out into the hallway. This time, he practically tripped over his own feet trying to get down the stairs. The door to the banquet hall was ajar again, even though he'd closed it when he'd left this afternoon. He arrived in the room panting and out of breath, and peered around in every corner for signs of life. The dishes which he'd left upon the table were gone. They had been replaced by a plate of baked chicken, a mashed potato topped with cheese, a glass of milk, a knife and fork, another napkin, and more strawberries.

This time, the Onceler backed out into the hallway and peered around, looking for any more open doors or scuffed rugs. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Helloooo? Who's there?" He waited for a few moments. There was no response. "You can come out, you know! I'm not going to be angry!" Still nothing. Pipsqueak was climbing up one of the chairs, reaching for the strawberries, and the rest of the meal really did smell good. The Onceler gave up and went back inside to a dinner that was as good as any he'd had when he'd been rich. He wondered if one (or maybe even several) of the housekeepers had stayed behind, but for what purpose? He had not known any of them personally. They would have no reason to help him now. And besides, all of his workers had seemed to understand quite clearly that there was nothing here for them anymore. Well fed and puzzled, the Onceler retired up the stairs to his bedroom to shower and brood over his business papers all night. He fell asleep in his chair in the early hours of the morning, Pipsqueak resting on his lap and his hat teetering halfway off his head.

The next morning, he did not even need to hear the bell. He woke up at the sound of scratching on his door and blinked his eyes at Pipsqueak, who was pacing back and forth and sniffing eagerly at the air. Putting his hat back on straight, he picked up his pet and shushed him, turning the handle of his door open as quietly as he could. Carefully, he crept down the hallway, hugging the wall, the soft carpet muffling the sound of his footsteps. Finally he reached the stairway and peered over the banister, ducking down so that his tallness would not give him away. The door to the banquet hall was once again ajar, and from inside he heard the soft but distinct clinking of dishes. Pipsqueak was wriggling around in his arms, and the Onceler allowed the bear to chew on his finger as he positioned himself so that he would be able to see the face of anyone leaving through the open door. A few moments of heavy silence followed, broken by the sweet tinkling of a bell. Upstairs, he held his breath and waited, leaning forward despite himself. He counted seconds, then minutes. The doorway remained empty. Unable to wait any longer, Pipsqueak let out a high-pitched whine, giving away their position. Straightening up, the Onceler tread softly down the stairs with the bear in his arms, keeping his eyes fixated upon the open doorway. Nothing moved inside. Drawing up outside the banquet hall, he drew a deep breath as he prepared to push his way in, the strange cousin of fear stirring in his heart. He strode through the doorway, and-

Wide blue eyes met an empty room. He blinked and scanned it again, sure that he must be mistaken. He walked around the hall, gazing behind every chair. He even checked under the table. He saw no signs of another human being. In front of his chair was a stack of steaming pancakes, a bottle of maple syrup, a cup of tea, new silverware, and yet another plate of strawberries. There really was no one else in the room with him. He checked the windows, but they were all still locked.

"Hello?" he called out. "Is somebody there?" No one answered. He moved down to the end of the table. "Whoever's there, I just wanted to, um, thank you for the pancakes….and the cleaning….and the food….and um, I, I hope I didn't do anything to make you not want to come out…." He cleared his throat and glanced around. He felt rather foolish standing in the middle of his banquet hall in his blue-and-yellow duckling pajamas, talking to an empty room. Who knew if the person could even hear him? "Well, um….thank you again, and….have a nice day." He flopped hungrily down in his chair and started to cut the fluffy pancakes into squares. The Onceler did not believe in any kind of ghosts, or phantoms, or spirits. Even if he had, he knew that ghosts did not arrange furniture or cook pancakes, and there would be no reason for a ghost to inhabit this manor anyway- it had been built only a few years ago, and to the best of his knowledge, no one had ever died in it. Still, he had to admit that it was rather eerie, but eerie in a way that made him curious rather than afraid. He knew that the mysterious presence meant him no harm- if they wanted to hurt him in some kind of ill-conceived revenge plot, why bother cooking him meals first? Still, it was curious….

And there was another curious thing, he realized as he lowered the plate of fruit to the floor for Pipsqueak. Where were the strawberries coming from? They could not have been harvested from his dead fields, and they looked too organic to have come from a store. Stooping down, he picked one up and popped it into his mouth. It was clear from the rich taste that it had never been sprayed with preservatives. He was positive that Onceler Fields had had the monopoly on berry farming in this county. He could have puzzled over it further, but the smell and taste of the red fruit tugged at his mind and threatened to send him into a spiral of depression. He trained his eyes back on the pancakes and let Pipsqueak finish off the strawberries, blissfully unaware that they had been the key to the rise and fall of the empire upon which his little paws were planted.

The phone rang three times over the course of the morning, and the doorbell clanged once. The Onceler had retreated to his bedroom and dressed himself as if for a business day, but he did not answer any of the calls. He peered out of the bottom slats of his window as he watched a group of people whom he did not know loiter on the front step of his manor for a good ten minutes before finally leaving. He watched their car putter down the road, and suddenly felt frustrated at his own cowardice. He could not hide from the world forever. He had done wrong, and he was going to have to emerge and face up to his mistakes sooner or later. If he didn't, his mistakes were going to hunt him down. He decided to start by opening the curtains which had been closed for the last three days. The light temporarily blinded him and caused his heart to beat faster, and he considered throwing them shut again. Instead, he marched out into the hallway and began opening the curtains out there as well, one by one whisking the heavy fabrics away from the windows' glass so that they revealed the destruction outside. The yellow fields were simmering in the heat of the day, looking like a festering sore against dead skin. He bit his lip, hard.

At the end of the hallway, he drew the last curtain back and blinked his eyes as a bright spot of copper orange dazzled them. Through the window, he observed a human figure moving along the side of the house. Her hair was glinting in the sunlight, and there was no question about it- this was the girl he had seen three days ago, the one who had stayed behind in the manor after everyone else had left. In her hands, she was carrying a frying pan and a covered wicker basket. Unaware that she was being watched, she walked calmly along the side of the building until she reached a door which he knew led into the back ground-floor hallway. She slipped through the door and vanished as cleanly as she had come.

For a moment, the Onceler didn't know what to do. Then his curiosity got the better of him and he took off for the stairs. He sailed sleekly down the banister and stumbled through the front room and into the south hallway, heading for the inside of the door which he had seen her go through. He couldn't decide whether or not to call out- he didn't want to startle her, but at the same time he didn't want her to hear him coming and escape again. In the end, his uncertainty was unneeded. He reached the door, checked outside, jogged down several adjoining hallways, and checked inside every room along the way. Finally he found himself in the front room again and slumped over on the banister in defeat. The girl with the brilliant copper hair was gone.


	3. In The Kitchens

**Hey! I'm back with another chapter, and it's a good one! :) Also, thank you for the reviews so far, guys. Reviews make me feel excited to write more!**

The Onceler considered staking out the banquet hall where the mysterious red-haired girl always left his meals, so that she would have to come into his line of sight if she wanted to leave them on the table. However, he eventually decided against this. He was worried that she would detect him and simply find somewhere else to leave the food, like in his bedroom or out in the hallway. He also didn't want to seem too intrusive when she wasn't doing anything to harm him (although the idea of being intrusive in his own manor was admittedly a little odd.) Instead, he decided on a less overbearing approach and wrote a note, crept downstairs, and left it in front of his chair in the banquet hall. After several crumpled-up revisions, the final draft read;

_Dear Miss,_

_I hope you're not dismayed that I am writing you a note when you clearly wish to keep yourself secret. I understand that you might be angry with me because of what has happened with the company, but I wanted to thank you for everything you're doing for Pipsqueak and I regardless. We greatly appreciate your cooking skills. _

_If you don't want to come out, perhaps you could write me back and tell me why you're here? I am mainly concerned that I don't have any money to compensate you for your services. However, I know that you are the girl with the copper hair from the first day, and my offer still stands: anything you might want from this manor is yours. _

_If you have any other concerns, please let me know and I will try to help. Thank you again for the delicious food._

_Respectfully,_

_O. Onceler_

He had gone out of his way to be polite, and he hoped that he hadn't gone overboard. He wanted her to write back, even though he was nervous about what she might say. Although the fact that she was voluntarily cooking him food meant that she did not want him dead, he know that it did not necessarily indicate any amiable feelings beyond that. His mistakes had ruined her livelihood- which, come to think of it, he didn't know that much about either. He was sure that he had never seen her before that day on the stairway. He would have remembered her luminous copper hair. Perhaps she had worked in the background of Onceler Fields, in the kitchens or in the processing/shipping center, but he knew that they had not hired any new people for at least eight months. He found it somewhat odd that she had managed to be completely unobtrusive for such a long period of time. Why? Perhaps she would explain it to him….

He snapped to alertness at the faint sound of the bell, and lifted Pipsqueak off the sheets of his bed as the little bear opened his wide brown eyes in excitement. He climbed up the Onceler's arm and flopped onto his shoulder, causing the man to huff slightly in amusement. Pipsqueak had never learned that although he was the perfect size for a cuddle-pet, he was a bit too large to be an ideal shoulder pet. However, the Onceler was focused on other things, so he humored his bear as he thumped down the stairs and hurried into the banquet hall, his thoughts buzzing with anticipation. The afternoon's meal consisted of minestrone soup, strawberries, and a tall glass of milk. There was a piece of white sheet paper on the table as well, with a strawberry bloom on top of it to hold it down. He unfolded the paper and let his eyes rove over the small, loopy handwriting.

_Dear Mr. Onceler,_

_I am glad that you and your little bear like my cooking. Please don't worry about compensation. I want nothing. My only concern is that the water remains turned on throughout the ground floor level of the manor. _

_I have washed your towels, and you will find them on the clothesline out back. Also, there are several bags of marshmallows in the front room, which I have placed on a high shelf so your bear won't get at them. I thought you might want some comfort food. Don't eat them all at once, or you'll make yourself sick. _

There was no signature. The Onceler turned the paper over to see the blank underside, and flopped down in his chair thoughtfully. Truth be told, this was not exactly the type of reply he had wanted. It was too vague and unspecific, and she had completely dodged the question of what she was doing here in the first place. Still, he supposed it was better than no reply at all, which would have been monumentally depressing. Pipsqueak was trying to climb down his arm to reach the strawberries, and the Onceler placed the plate in front of the nearest chair and allowed the little bear to sit on the table and stuff them in his mouth. After all, it wasn't as if his mother were around to complain about animals at the table anymore. "I think she doesn't want to talk to me," he mused despondently to his pet as he tucked in to the soup. "That's why she's hiding out and writing notes. What do you think?"

The furry mammal chirruped, and the Onceler sighed and turned his eyes down. "I can't say I blame her. I don't really want to talk to me either."

/

A day later, he lay quietly on the sheets of his bed, staring into a framed photograph which had once occupied his dresser. It was of his whole family, gathered in front of the manor together. They looked happy and relaxed, as though they might have just finished a picnic on the grass, but the Onceler knew the truth: it had taken him forever to assemble all of them in that spot and convince them to stay long enough to get their photo taken. His mother was constantly booked or double-booked with appointments to the hair salon, the massage center, the exclusive stores in town, and/or the ladies' tea club. The twins simply could not stand still for a large amount of time. He always had to drag them back to the front of the house, and when he finally got them there, another family member would have wandered off. It was difficult to pry his aunt off the couch when she was on it; and his uncle didn't see the value of a family photograph in the first place. Strange as it was, since they were so wealthy and carefree back then, but the man was always worrying. He was always looking into business deals and doing complicated calculations, afraid of losing even a dime of their fortune. The photographer had grown impatient and nearly left, and the Onceler had ended up paying her double the usual fee to stay. It was he who had wanted the picture of all of them in front of the manor. His other relatives had not seemed to care about it, even when it turned out so nicely.

The Onceler's reverie was broken by a sudden scratching at his door. Looking up, he saw that Pipsqueak had left his place on the bed and was prowling around by the doorway, scratching to go out. He tilted his head in confusion. "What is it, Pip? It's nowhere near dinnertime yet. There's no food for us downstairs."

The bear whined and continued to bat at the door. The Onceler reached inside his nightstand drawer and pulled out a white, spongy treat. "C'mere, have a marshmallow. You have to be patient." When Pipsqueak still did not come, the tall man raised his eyebrow in perplexity and stood, moving over to the entrance. "No? Not even for a marshmallow? Geez, what's out there that's so…."

He pulled down the handle and opened the door to take a look into the hallway. At that moment, the little bear shot through the doorway and began to trundle away with surprising speed. The Onceler did a double take and ran out into the hallway after him. "Pipsqueak-? Pipsqueak! Where do you think you're going? Come back!" He pursued the galloping bear around corners, through corridors, and down a flight of stairs into more corridors. To his surprise, Pipsqueak was not heading for the front room where the banquet hall was located- in fact, he seemed to be going in the exact opposite direction. Since his legs were exponentially longer, the Onceler had not anticipated how hard it would be to catch his little pet. Every time he drew up alongside him, the bear would run a circle around him or dive through his legs and continue on. He was nearly tripping over himself trying to grab the fleeing furball. It was not until Pipsqueak paused at a fork to sniff the air that he realized that the walls no longer had paintings hung on them, and he had no idea where they were. "Pip….? Where are we….?"

The little bear hooted and began to trot away down the right hallway, prompting the Onceler to follow him. The hallways that they walked down were bare, painted a scratched dark blue. The floors were chipped and scuffed from being passed over by many pairs of feet. Every now and then they would pass by a closed door, but Pipsqueak did not seem interested in them. The Onceler was fairly certain he had never been here before. His interior decorator had obviously never made it this far. The hallways looked so dreary. They felt so economical, as if there were no other purpose to them but to conduct people efficiently from one place to another. And they smelled….spicy?

The Onceler drew in another deep breath of air, blinking his eyes in surprise. There was an unaccountable spicy smell pervading the air, lingering around every corner they turned. It grew stronger as they moved deeper into this new place, and Pipsqueak began to trundle faster once again. After a few moments of uncertainty, the Onceler snapped his fingers as realization leaped into his mind. They were in the servants' quarters- they had finally found them- and the place they were heading to could only be the kitchens. That meant….

Pipsqueak paused outside a door that was hanging halfway open, slightly larger than the others. A noise which sounded like sizzling was coming from within. The Onceler would have preferred a moment to compose himself, but his pet didn't hesitate, rearing up and placing two front paws on the open door. It swung open further as he dropped down and scampered inside, and the Onceler had no choice but to follow him, drawing his shoulders together as he did so. The insides of the kitchen were huge and mostly illuminated by the shine of metal. However, his attention was immediately drawn to a different sort of gleam, over in the corner by the oven. The back of the red-haired girl was to him, and the shine of her copper locks made all the silver metals around her pale in comparison. She was cooking something in a pan on the stove, using a spatula to prod at it occasionally. For a long moment, she did not seem to realize they were there, and the Onceler could think of no better idea than to stand still and stare at her hair. Then Pipsqueak hooted curiously, and she spun around quickly. Her wide green eyes took them both in, raising the spatula defensively to her side. Then her expression relaxed and she lowered it back down to the pan. "So," she said to him, "you've finally found me."

"I….have," he replied, taking a step closer and glancing all around him. Hand towels were hanging from the shelves, dishes were drip-drying on the rack, and various foods had been set about on the center table of the cooking area. The smell of warm spices was very strong. "Although it was really Pipsqueak who found you, I guess….he led me here. You must be using some strong sort of ingredient that he can smell from upstairs. He does that all the time, whenever I try to hide food….it's the darndest thing." He rubbed the back of his neck nervously and mentally smacked himself for his awkward rambling. The girl tilted her head, gazing down at his pet, who was now gamboling around her feet. "Anyway, I….I hope you don't mind me intruding in the kitchen. I was just….curious."

"Oh no, not at all," the girl said, flipping over the things she was cooking in the pan. The Onceler could now see that they were two good-sized slabs of chicken. "You do live here."

"Yeah….I guess," he replied, his shoulders slumping a little. "Hey, uh- could I ask you a question? If you don't mind."

"Sure," she answered, sliding the cooked chicken off of the pan and onto a nearby cutting board. He watched as she began to cut the slabs into small bits, her stainless steel knife flashing with efficiency.

"I was just wondering, um….why-why you're still here. Why you stayed behind. I mean, everyone realizes how bad this is. The company's gone under. I can't pay you, there's no-"

"Mr. Onceler," she declared, turning around to face him as the oven beeped, "I meant what I said in my note. I don't want anything from you. Much like you, I'm-" she paused and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, causing him to look up at her in interest. "I'm trying to sort through my own affairs right now. I never thought Onceler Fields would implode so quickly and everyone would have to leave. I have a place I can go to, but someone else is occupying it until fall. I assumed that I would be staying….here for spring and summer, like I've always done. Besides, I have some things here which I still need to attend to."

She turned away and went back to work with the knife on the other piece of chicken. The Onceler didn't know what to say. Nothing in her tone had sounded particularly accusatory, but even so, the fact remained that her precarious living situation was entirely his fault. Grasping at straws, he replied meekly, "Is that why you didn't want to come out? Did you think I'd…."

"Ask me to leave? Yes," she said briskly, whisking the diced chicken into a giant green mixing bowl. "If you still feel that way, I'll understand. This isn't my home, after all, and you're in the middle of an immense personal crisis. People tend to want to be alone when they're going through those."

"No, I d- I- uh….then why- why'd you do this?" He indicated toward the meal which she was in the process of making. She looked up at him again, her eyes like emerald spots in an aqua sea.

"I wanted to make sure you had good food, at the very least. Besides, you probably would have died of starvation or something if I hadn't set up a regular meal delivery system." She coughed into her hand, and he could tell from the shape of her eyes that she was trying to disguise a laugh. He didn't know what to do with this knowledge.

"I…."

"It took you four days to find the kitchens, Mr. Onceler. And it sounds like you only found them because of this little one here." She tossed a spare bit of chicken to Pipsqueak, who yelped happily as he caught it in his mouth.

The Onceler fiddled with his sleeves, knowing that she was right. "Well, I- I just want to thank you-again- for all the good food, and for cleaning the manor too. And, um, you can stay here if you want to. I was never planning to kick you out. I just wanted to know who you were. Speaking of which….what's your name?" He said this all rather quickly, and the copper-haired girl smiled sincerely.

"I'm Audrey."

"Audrey…." He rolled the name around in his head and found that it fit. He liked it. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Can I, uh, help you with anything? I don't know much about cooking, but I can follow directions…."

He reached for the pan on the stove absentmindedly, and the next moment he found his hand rapidly encased in two smaller ones. "No, don't touch the metal part! It's still hot enough to burn you."

"I'm sorr-" He took a step back in surprise, and felt something hard clang into the back of his head. Pipsqueak squealed and Audrey put her hands to her mouth as he turned disorientedly away from it, directly into another hard thing. He finally had the sense to duck, and discovered that a row of pans was hanging out to dry on a rack above his head. Blushing furiously, he maneuvered away from them, wishing he could pull his hat down over his head and disappear into it.

"Oh dear, you don't seem to have much luck with pans, do you? You're so tall; if I had known you were coming, I would have hung them up higher. Come here." Hiding a smile in her hand again, Audrey led him safely through the maze of pans and pressed her fingers against his head. "Does this hurt?"

"No. My skull's pretty thick," the Onceler quipped, daring to risk a tiny grin.

Audrey nodded. "In that case…." She glanced slowly around the kitchen, and he could sense that she was surreptitiously searching for a very simple culinary task which did not involve fire, hot metal, or sharp objects. "….Why don't you wash the strawberries and then put them in a bowl?"

She indicated to a wire contraption on the counter in which a group of the fat, red berries were gathered. The Onceler approached it curiously. "What is this thing….?"

"It's called a sieve," Audrey called out, beginning to pour pre-measured amounts of cheese, spices, sauce, and a green leaf-ish thing into the mixing bowl with the chicken. "You keep the strawberries inside and put it under running water. The water runs back out the holes, and the berries stay put. Make sure you shake it just a little, so they get washed from all sides. It cleans out the dirt and chemical particles still on the surface of the berries."

The Onceler could not help it; at the word 'chemical,' his fingers twitched and he almost dropped the strawberries into the sink. Audrey's eyes glazed over him, and she turned politely back to her mixing bowl, pretending she hadn't seen anything. He tried to focus on washing off the strawberries, but he couldn't help that his eyes kept running fixatedly over their soft red skins, as if searching for chemicals which he knew couldn't be seen with the naked eye. Eventually, he gave up and watched the reflective shine of Audrey's hair instead.

There were so many things he wanted to know about her. Where did she live during the fall and winter? Didn't she have a family that could take her in? Why had she worked here, and what had the job meant to her? What were the things which she still needed to attend to? All of these questions burned in the base of his throat, but his brain obstinately dumped water on the flames. All of them were too personal. Although he was more than relieved that he'd finally found her, he didn't want to push his luck by intruding any further than he should on a first meeting. However, there was one question which he considered fairly innocuous.

"Hey, Audrey-" he placed the dripping wet sieve back on the counter, tilting his head in puzzlement. "Where are you getting all these strawberries from? Did you order them in bulk from somewhere west of here?"

The copper-haired girl smiled wanly, opening up the oven's door so that a wave of heat swept over him as he stood at the sink. "You really don't know that much about your own places, do you?" she asked him as she slid into the oven a perfectly rolled batch of chicken enchiladas.


	4. A Bit of a Story

**Hello, everyone! I'M BACK!**

**First of all, I'd like to apologize for taking so ridiculously long to update this story (a whole month!) The final month of school was intense, and I had a lot of completely unrelated personal problems fall out of the sky on me as well. And when you're lying squished under a pile of exams, homework, and personal troubles, it's hard to stretch your fingers out far enough to reach your keyboard and type. XD**

**However, now that I am out for the summer, it's time to start writing again! I'm glad that some new people seem to have found this story in the meantime. Remember, reviews make me feel excited to write more! They are the kryptonite for my superpowered writer-ness! :)**

A day or so later found the Onceler in his office with his hands over his face. A gray telephone was poised on the desk in front of him, its red lights flashing like emergency warnings. At the moment, he was mainly trying to avoid seeing it. After days of putting it off, he had finally decided to bite the bullet and listen to the accumulated messages on his answering machine. He had shut himself in his office three hours ago, and had just finished writing down the necessary information from the last message. He had managed to get through them all by telling himself that it couldn't all be bad news, that there must be at least a particle of hope amidst the hundreds of grim-sounding voice recordings. But now his naïve bubble had burst; it was all bad news. The messages were full of the sharp voices of creditors wanting payments, the low, defeated tones of investors calling to officially inform him of their withdrawal from his company, and the harried voices of former employees, wanting work records or final paychecks. Each voice sent a new spear through his heart. Some of these people had trusted him, and he had let them down. Some of them had hated him when he had been strong, and were going to prey on him now that he was weak. Many of them had only been interested in him when he'd had money, and were now only interested in salvaging whatever they could tear off of his sunken company for themselves. And above all that- beyond the accusing voices of strangers and acquaintances and business associates- what hurt him worst of all was the deafening absence of the one set of voices he had been hoping to hear. His family had not called even once. Over 200 messages, and not a one was from his mother, his brothers, or his aunt and uncle. The Onceler put down his pad of paper and laid his head on the desk, pushing the phone away from him and focusing only on his breathing, turning his thoughts away from the burning pain inside his chest.

He raised his head a tiny bit when he heard a knock on the door of his office. Since she'd been discovered in the kitchens, Audrey had abandoned her secretive meal delivery system and instead had started bringing food to him directly. He liked this better because it meant that he could talk to her, although it was clear that she was still not used to his presence. She was hesitant and guarded in her conversation, which made him hesitant as well. He did not like the idea that he might make her uncomfortable, although he supposed he could understand. It was his fault she no longer had a job….

The door handle turned, and the bright copper figure of Audrey sidled into the room, carrying a tray stacked with dishes. She was wearing a green dress today, along with gold leggings that nicely accented the color in her eyes. Pipsqueak tumbled in the door after her, literally dogging her heels across the room to his messy desk. Brushing her hair out of her eyes, she gave it a quick glance-over. "Wow. That's a lot of paper."

The Onceler managed to straighten himself up enough to begin pushing the papers to the edges of his desk, making room for the tray. He didn't bother trying to smile or agree with her. He simply didn't have the energy to pretend like he wasn't in the depths of despair. He didn't even feel hungry, although he would never mention this to her. Audrey set the tray down in front of him- a grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of tomato soup, a miniature plate of strawberries, and a glass of apple juice- and tilted her head so that her hair fell onto the papers like a copper curtain. "Mr. Onceler, are you all right?"

"Not really," he mumbled brusquely, folding his arms across his chest. "I just…." He bowed his head and sighed. He had no idea how to express the myriad of things he was feeling, contradictory pains and pressures from all sides. He wanted to scream, tear up all the papers and throw them out the window; at the same time, he wanted to sink down quietly into a quicksand pit and never be seen again. He was being smothered inside his own self-made nightmare.

Audrey bent down to look into his face, and then straightened up and folded her hands nervously in front of her. He noticed that they were calloused and tanned, flushed like her hair. "I'm sorry there isn't more I can do to help you."

"You don't need to feel obliged to help me," he muttered, casting his eyes about his desk in sullen frustration. "This is my fault. I did this. I don't know why I ever thought I could do _anything._"

"You did do something." Audrey argued lightly, settling down on the edge of his desk. "You built a hugely successful company out of nothing- you literally grew it up out of the dirt."

"Yeah, and then I brought it right back down into the dirt." The Onceler laughed bitterly, rolling the wrist of the hand he had been writing with around in circles. "Really, who does that? Who is lucky enough to find themselves blessed with everything they could ever want, and yet is so irresponsible as to lose it all? What in the hell kind of person am I?" He squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his forehead with the palm of his other hand, vaguely wondering if he was making Audrey uncomfortable with his ranting. To his surprise, he heard her soft voice ring out from the same place beside the desk.

"It wasn't all your fault, Mr. Onceler."

"Yes it w-"

"No, it wasn't. Not all of it. It was that other man….O'Hare. You may have been irresponsible and stupid, but he was cruel and greedy and wicked….and he knew it."

"How did you know O'Hare?" The Onceler asked curiously, lifting his head out of his hand and gazing up at Audrey. The red-haired girl was staring over his head, out the window.

"I used to work in the fields."

"What?" he asked, taken entirely by surprise. If he really thought about it, it did made sense- her tanned skin, her calloused hands, the sun hat, the reason why he had never seen her in the manor before- but even so, he still had not expected to hear that from her. There was something about Audrey which he couldn't equate with field work, the lowest-paying, hardest-working, and most highly unstable job associated with the berry farm. "You mean you were a migrant worker? Is that why you were only here during the spring and summer?"

"Yes," she said, nodding toward the window. "Spring and summer are for strawberries. I spend the fall and winter down south. I work in a cannery. But I can't go down there now. The cannery doesn't need me yet. I also work part-time in a Chinese restaurant during those seasons, and I live above the place with the family that owns it. But my room will be occupied right now by their cousins, and they don't leave until late August. And I don't have enough money to afford my own apartment at the regular rate."

The Onceler blinked. "That sounds….hard," he assessed, tilting his head in puzzlement. "Why would you do that?"

Now it was Audrey's turn to give him a puzzled look, raising her eyebrow and turning her green orbs away from the window's glass. "What do you mean 'why'? I've never met any migrant workers who lived this way because they wanted to. It's not a question of why. It's a question of _how_."

The Onceler glanced down at his desk, suddenly feeling uncomfortable with the way her eyes grew tired when she looked out at the fields. After a long pause, he asked softly, "So….did you live out in the field workers' housing, then?"

"Yes. Not always. But for the last two seasons of spring and summer, yes." Audrey indicated toward the nearby hill which covered the smattering of factory houses which he had purchased several years ago in order to house his field workers and their families. In the end, it had been much easier to build them a small neighborhood on his land than to hire them from outside the community. Many of them did not have reliable transportation and could not have made daily commutes to Onceler Fields. Besides that, having them live on the farm ensured that they would be available to watch over the crops at all hours. Of all the workers on his farm, the migrant workers- harvesters, as he called them in his head, although they were in charge of the planting, too- had probably been the most enigmatic to him. He had not known any of them personally, since he almost never saw them. It had been O'Hare's job to manage the fields. The planting and harvesting of the strawberries had required them to work odd hours, and they had only spent half the year at Onceler Fields, anyway. The other half, when their services were not needed, they'd left to find work elsewhere, and the factory homes had sat empty below the hill. He thought of them as they must be now, empty of field workers, deserted- and his mind stuttered as the image of Audrey living down tried to force its way in. Of all the things he'd imagined a harvester might be like (when he'd thought of them at all, which wasn't often,) he certainly never thought he'd meet one like her. Why had she worked out there, anyway? Why didn't she have a better job, a better place to live? He opened his mouth to ask her this, and changed track just in time, aware of how rude such a question would probably sound. "How many years have you worked here, then?"

"Five years. Two while living in the field houses." Audrey reported matter-of-factly. "I'm still living out there, actually."

"What?" the Onceler blurted out again in surprise. "You're- why are you still living out there? I assumed you were living in the manor….somewhere."

"Well, no. I wasn't just going to move into someone else's house without asking," the copper-haired girl replied, as if this should have been obvious.

"But I said you could stay here."

"On the land, yes."

"Oh. Well, I meant in the manor. You can stay in the manor….if you want." He rubbed his wrist gently, staring down at the ankle cuffs of the girl's golden leggings.

Audrey drew in her breath. "Are you sure? I mean, if you don't want someone else around, which I completely understand-"

"Audrey," he insisted, the name still feeling new upon his tongue, "have you seen how expansive this place is? It was unnecessarily huge even when my whole family lived here." He paused and bit his lip for a moment. "There's plenty of room. You don't have to walk back and forth through the fields every day just to get here."

He looked up just in time to catch her smiling prettily at him. "Well then, thank you," she said with a nod. "I've always been a bit curious about this place."

"We can find you a suitable room right now," the Onceler said, standing up. For a moment, the blood seemed to rush to his head and he teetered unsteadily beside the desk. Audrey rushed forward and caught him, her small hands on both his shoulders. For a moment, he looked into her- her eyes were green flecked with gold, her hair shone brighter than a newly minted penny, her skin was everywhere touched by the sun, and she was honest and earnest and _here_- and he felt a stab of regret from somewhere so deep inside him that he couldn't sense its origin. For a moment, he had a crazy urge to rub his thumb along the line of her cheek, where faded sun-freckles were just beginning to show.

Audrey, completely unaware of his inner turmoil, propped him up and picked up the tray from the desk with her other hand. "You haven't eaten, Mr. Onceler, and you're completely exhausted. Before we do anything else, let's go downstairs and heat this up again. I lugged one of the kitchen's microwaves into your banquet hall this morning, I figured it would be more convenient, instead of going all the way to the back of the house…. You can show me the rooms after that. And we have to hide the marshmallows again, only an hour ago I caught Pipsqueak running down the hall, dragging a whole bag of them in his mouth!"

The Onceler could tell that Audrey was trying to distract him from the gloom of his overly depressing office. Still, there was something about her determined stride and her sun-freckles and the way she linked her arm in his that gave him a tiny bit of happiness, even while that mysterious regret was still coursing through him. Unexpectedly, he found that he felt hungry again. Turning away from the accusatory papers scattered across his desk, he allowed the copper-haired girl to lead him out of his office, resolving not to come back until he'd found her a room and helped her to prepare dinner.


	5. Painting

**Hello, everyone! I'm back! **

**First off, I would like to apologize very much for leaving off this story for several months. *headdesk* Bad, bad author! For some reason, I just lost all motivation to write this story and couldn't manage to make myself do it. Which is weird, since I really like this story...but anyway...yeah. I have no idea how the inner working of my brain function. But I saw someone wearing a Lorax hat the other day, and I was like, "Gosh darn it, I need to continue that story!" *runs off to find laptop* So anyway, here is the next chapter. I promise to bring out another update soon. :3**

**Also, as an offering of apology for being a evil author and not updating, I made a Lorax video! Yes! It's not Onceler/Audrey, sadly, I'm not quite that talented with a video editor. But anyway, it has that song from the ending credits of WallE in it. It's my first time doing something like this, so please** **enjoy it if you'd like to! I can't put a link on here, but it can be found on YouTube by typing in _The Lorax- Down to Earth._**

Tuesday was the day which the Onceler would always remember afterward as the day things began to change, although it started out no different than had other days as of late. After a delicious breakfast, he sent Pipsqueak upstairs to play with Audrey while he sequestered himself inside his office and forced himself to attend to business. In the past, he'd always seen business as an exciting venture, one which he had willingly spent vast amounts of time fine-tuning; new opportunities, profitable deals, and the gratification of mounting sales. Even when he'd had to stay up late for nights on end and travel on business trips during the holidays, he had always been assured that it would all pay out in the end. Now, he had to use every ounce of self-discipline he possessed to keep himself in his office. He had the vague sensation that the world was ending, that he would step outside one day (if he ever got a spare moment,) and see that the blighted earth stretched out beyond his berry farm; it covered towns, countries, continents of wreckage, and no one cared about his failed company anymore, since it was just one in a million failed enterprises, torched dreams. In a world where everything was torn asunder, maybe he would still have a chance. But it wasn't; the world outside Onceler Fields was progressing as usual. Traffic still passed by on the distant road, and the local news channels ran all the usual attention-getting headlines. Children went to school and stores opened on time. For everyone else not connected with his company, the implosion of Onceler Fields was nothing more than a tiny blip on their radars. What he wouldn't give to be one of them. He alone was sinking down into a dark pit of destruction and shame.

When the Onceler couldn't take being alone with his depressing thoughts anymore, he decided to go find Audrey and see if she would tolerate his presence. More and more, he found himself tending to seek out the redhead's company as the days wound past. She could lift his spirits in the most subtle of ways, and although he knew that she had worries of her own, they never seemed to weigh her down. This probably had something to do with the fact that she had been living in a state of economic distress for a good while at this point- maybe even all her life. She had learned how to laugh at instability and dance with uncertainty. _I used to be able to do that, too,_ the Onceler thought as he walked through his empty hallways, heading for the guest room he had given her. _But that was a long time ago._ _I've forgotten how to be happy in poverty. _

The Onceler pushed open the door to Audrey's guest bedroom and blinked his eyes in surprise. The dresser had been moved, and the floor where it had been was covered in newspapers. In the center of the large square of newsprint stood a worn wooden easel, and perched against its slats was a canvas, completely covered in paint. Sitting in front of that was Audrey, her face pressed intensely close to the canvas as she etched out a tiny design with the smallest paintbrush he had ever seen. Pipsqueak was sitting on the edge of the newspaper island, hooting happily. Audrey dug her hand into her pocket without taking her eyes off the canvas and tossed a marshmallow directly into the little bear's mouth. Then she smiled and turned around to meet the Onceler's gaze. "Oh, hello, Mr. Onceler. I hope you don't mind that I'm painting. I put some old newspapers down first. I found them piled up near the back door."

"No, please go ahead. You're perfectly welcome to paint. Where did you get this….?" he asked curiously, noticing the intricate collection of paint tubes and brushes inside of an unfolding wooden box near Audrey's ankle.

She smiled, making her sun-freckles show on her cheeks. "I carried them up from the field housing area. I've been collecting them all my life. It's so much easier now that I can just keep them here. I've been working on this painting for two months. I didn't used to have a lot of time to do things like this, so…." Her lips quirked upward and she stroked the canvas with her brush again.

"What are you pa-" The Onceler walked to the side of Audrey and instantly fell silent, staring down at a familiar scene which he never thought he'd see again. There were his strawberry fields, ripe in bloom and fruition, not a sickly yellow but a full-bodied mixture of green, brown, and red. The red dominated the scene, amplified by the deep, rosy blush of a rising sunrise coming up over the distant hill. The Onceler sat down on a second chair which had been lurking in the corner, staring at the unexpected image. The painting itself was more impressionistic than realistic, but those were definitely his strawberry fields, viewed from the vantage point of the hill behind the field workers' housing area. The long, running rows were completely empty of human presence. They looked so peaceful and serene. "I would have thought you would've gotten tired of seeing those fields," he murmured quietly.

Audrey smiled at him in a slightly pained way. "During the hot summer days that I used to spend harvesting the berries down in the valleys, you'd better believe I got sick of them. But I used to wake up early in the morning and climb that hill before it was time to work so I could see the sunrise. Sometimes I climbed up it to watch the sunset too, if I wasn't too tired. Up there, it was a lot closer to the sky and the breeze. And the way the red fields just stretched out over that vista, filling up the valleys like red wine in green glasses….it was something extraordinary, that's for sure. I could never get tired of seeing the berry fields from the top of that hill."

The Onceler sighed deeply, leaning his elbows against his knees and lowering his chin over his hands. "My favorite part was the smell. I always loved the smell of strawberries. When I was working mornings in my office, I would keep bowls of strawberries on my desk just so the scent would fill the air around me. And I would eat them throughout the day, too. They were delicious," he admitted, feeling a deep pang of nostalgia ricochet its way through his heart. Right away, he decided to redirect the conversation away from the dark red elephant in the room. "So, Audrey….before you came here, where did you live?"

The red-haired girl followed him willingly onto this new track. "I lived in a trailer park on the other side of town. With my mother. I used to ride the bus to get here early every morning, before the post office vans were even out to deliver the newspapers. Everyone started the field work really early so that we could take a rest when the hottest part of the day came around."

"Did your mother work here too?" the Onceler asked, trying and failing to recall any of the faces of the field laborers whom he had formerly employed. He hoped that his lack of recollection did not show on his own face.

Audrey shook her head, lowering her brush to her side. "No. She was a janitor at a large insurance firm in town. But she became unable to work about five years ago, so I got a job at Onceler Fields when I was still in high school. I moved into the field workers' housing two years ago, after she died. She had breast cancer." As she said this Audrey was not looking at him, but back into the world of her painting, the strawberry rows running down the slopes of the hillsides like rivers and rivers of blood.

"Oh my gosh, I am so sorry to hear that. Sorry…." The Onceler hunched his shoulders forward uncomfortably, fearing that maybe he shouldn't have asked. A faint tickle of pressure against his lower right leg caused him to look down and see that Pipsqueak was trying to climb up into his lap. He stooped over and lifted the little bear to him, glancing cautiously over at Audrey.

She brushed her hair out of her face and pursed her lips. "It's all right. I mean, it's not all right, obviously, but there's nothing anyone can do about it anymore." The Onceler, by this time familiar with bitterness, could detect a trace of it in her lilting voice. He lifted his eyes curiously to meet hers. Audrey sighed. "She could have lived longer if they had taken better care of her in the hospital," she explained softly. "Unfortunately, we didn't have health insurance when she got sick, and afterward we couldn't get any company to provide coverage for my mother. She had a pre-existing condition, that's what they said. The hospital admitted her and gave her treatment, of course, they had to, they're not allowed to just leave a sick woman out to die….but there were so many things we couldn't afford. In a perfect world, the same care and options would be given to _every _sick person, regardless of whether they had insurance of not. Unfortunately, this is the real world, and things always don't work like that." Audrey stared ahead of her for a moment and then reached out to pet Pipsqueak, who was currently nibbling on the bottom button of the Onceler's gray vest. "By the middle of the third year, I knew that she was going to die eventually….but I just….I wasn't ready yet."

The Onceler considered, and then gently reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, watching her face carefully for signs that she did not want him to touch her. She gave none, and he let his fingers curl over the patchwork cloth of her yellow-and-green dress. Audrey swallowed hard and then looked up at him from under the hanging eaves of her copper hair. "What about you? Where did you come from?"

"I came from far, far away," the Onceler confessed, figuring that he ought to reciprocate and tell Audrey a few things about himself. "It took me weeks of travelling to make it here after I struck out on my own. Believe it or not, my family used to be very poor. Our home was in the middle of a wasteland, or at least that was what it seemed like to me- all brown. No green anywhere."

"Did you have a big family?" Audrey asked in an extremely gentle tone.

The Onceler caught Pipsqueak as the bear tried to climb up onto his shoulder. "I did, somewhat. There was my Uncle Ubb and Aunt Grizelda, my older twin brothers, Bret and Chet, and my mother, Isabella. That was all. I….never knew my father," the tall man admitted, rubbing the back of his neck and hoping that Audrey wouldn't take this as a mark against him. "My mother always said that we didn't need him around."

"I didn't know my father either," Audrey said, giving him an understanding look. "My parents separated when I was very little. My mother said he was a violent man. He had been in the army, and they sent him overseas to fight in a war. He came back with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe psychological damage. He was never able to re-adjust himself to civilian life. I don't know what happened to him after he left us." She blinked, and stared out the window of her guest room. "….But the past can't be changed, you know, so enough about that. What are you going to do about _this?_" She indicated toward the acres and acres of yellowed disaster just beyond the manor's border.

The Onceler sighed and closed his eyes. "I truly don't know. I mean, the land is still mine, I own it, but it's useless now. I won't be able to plant anything out there. I don't think there's anything I can do." He swallowed hard and stared at the ground, feeling ever more like a failure.

Audrey set her paintbrush down on the easel and scooted her chair back. "What about the land on the other side of the river? Nothing has ever been planted there, and no pesticides have been sprayed. You've had us turn over the soil out there in the Spring for the last three years."

"Yes, but that land isn't nearly as fertile as the land on this side. It's a lot higher and more rugged. All of the rich soil from the river gets deposited in the valleys over here. That's why I've never bothered with that land. To tell the truth, I only had the harvesters turn over the soil out there because I needed to find some work for them to do after they'd finished with the berry fields in the late summer."

"But since the land over here is now so sick with chemicals, doesn't that make _that_ land a better prospect for replanting?" Audrey asked, leaning forward.

The Onceler shook his head. "It's not that simple. It has to do with more than agriculture. I can't re-plant any of the old strawberry plants from here over there. They've all been smothered with pesticides. Even if I bought new ones, I would have to wait until next Spring to plant them. And it can take a year or two for new strawberry plants to start producing fruit in high enough yields to sell it commercially. Even then, the new plants might falter in this climate or not take to the terrain. My investors wouldn't be willing to wait that long or take that many risks. After all, I've already failed them once." The Onceler sighed. "I wish I could make it different, but I can't. _This_ is never coming back." He indicated to the glory of the painting, waves of red against a glowing sky. "I deserve this, I suppose. I ruined everything."

Audrey stood up suddenly and the Onceler tensed, thinking she was finally going to lay into him for destroying the berry fields with his stupid, careless greed. Instead, she lifted Pipsqueak off his lap and beckoned for him to stand up, too. "Come on. We're going for a walk."

"What?" the Onceler asked, obeying in confusion. "Where? I can't- I can't go into town," he stammered, blushing in shame.

"Don't worry, we're not going there. We're going across the river," Audrey said determinedly, bending over and twisting the caps back onto their tubes of paint. "But first, let's go to the kitchen and pack a lunch. Pipsqueak can come with us, too."

"But….why?" the Onceler called as Audrey started for the door, cradling the happy little bear at her side. He wasn't sure how he felt about venturing out into his self-made wasteland.

She turned her head back and gave him a pointed look. "You're giving up too easily, Mr. Onceler. You built this and you broke it, so you should at least look for a way to fix it. Besides, you need to get out of the house and away from your office. Come on!"

Agreeing with her last statement in principle at least, the Onceler hesitated for a moment, glanced back at Audrey's painting, then followed the enthusiastic redhead out the door and into the sunlit hallway.


	6. Valle de las Fresas

**Hi folks! I'm back again with the promised update! Sorry it took a few more days than I anticipated...I was working on a big order in one of my other areas of skill which involved a lantern, paint, and A LOT of origami irises. XD**

**Anyway, I will be very happy if you review! Reviews give inspiration to my writing eagerness. However they are NOT my kryptonite, since I have been informed that kryptonite is actually bad for Superman. (Should have watched those old movies, lol.) Anyway, please review! :3**

The Onceler breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the yellowed strawberry fields dropped out of sight behind the hill he and Audrey were currently descending. It had been rather depressing to pass along the meridian of those fields and see the once-healthy strawberry rows now lying sick and flat against the ground, the strawberries turned into black smudges against the dirt. Now that they were up and out of the valley, however, he felt marginally better, even though he knew the fields would still be there when they came back. The tall, lanky man was swinging the picnic basket and walking along beside Audrey, who was holding Pipsqueak and cooing to him in the voice that women used when talking to babies or soft animals. They were heading down the hill to the river which he had once used to irrigate his crops. The Onceler could just make out a tiny footbridge at the bottom, probably built by some former field hands. He had not been out here in what seemed like a long time, but Audrey seemed to know where she was going perfectly well, even though she was only half-paying attention to the route. He smiled at the motherly look upon her face as she cradled Pipsqueak, who was entertaining himself by batting at her strands of copper hair. "He's adorable, isn't he?"

"I think he's one of the cutest things I've ever seen in my life," Audrey agreed, tickling Pipsqueak's furry belly. "If I had children-which I don't, but I mean, I will, someday- he's exactly the kind of pet I'd want to have to play with them. Where'd you get him?"

"Found him," the Onceler said, indicating over his shoulder. "In the berry fields. I usually wasn't out in the fields very much, but one day I needed a break from my office and I decided to take a walk out there where no one was harvesting, so I wouldn't get in the way. And what do you know but this little guy comes running out of the plants and bumps right into my leg! I jumped so far back I almost fell into a ditch! I thought he was an odd cat at first, but then I picked him up to get a look at him- and the rest is history. His mouth was all stained from eating berries and he looked a little tired and scared. So I took him inside and made him up a place to sleep in my bedroom. Ever since then this little furball's got the idea that he owns the entire manor." The Onceler shrugged good-naturedly, reaching out to rub Pipsqueak on the head. "There's not much I can do. He's really grown on me."

"Of course he has. I can tell he really likes you," Audrey smiled and looked ahead, and the Onceler realized they can come to the footbridge which led across the river. It was not very wide, but it was appropriately long and looked secure. He started to walk forward, but Audrey held out her arm. "Just a minute, let me check…." She lithely descended the bank and peered at the underside of the bridge as it stretched across the river. A moment later, she had scrambled back up. "All right, everything's in place. Let's head for the hills!"

The Onceler glanced upward as he and Audrey began the trek across the footbridge. The land beyond the river was not so much a series of hills and valleys, like the one they had just left behind. Rather, it was more like a gradual slope upward, made of barren, flat dirt. However, although the incline was gentle, the land soon reached heights greater than those achieved by the hills on the other side of the river. All of this was his, and he owned pieces of land upriver and downriver as well, but those purchases had been made simply to ensure his monopoly on water access for his berry farm. After all, it wouldn't do to have someone else across the river trying to use the water for some other venture which might not be compatible with his own. The Onceler did not truly understand why they were taking this trip out to his buffer lands, but Audrey seemed to have something in mind, and he was starting to get the feeling that she knew more than she was letting on about- well- everything. Besides, she had been so nice to him before that he just couldn't help but trust her. And lastly, Pipsqueak liked her. That sealed the deal for her overall goodness in his mind.

The two of them let their conversation peter out as they became more focused on the physical rigor of the climb. As his breathing became heavier, the Onceler glanced around at the stretches of bare dirt surrounding them. He couldn't tell from here whether the soil was good or not, but at first glance it did not appear to bear the bleached, dried-out look of the soil across the river. Almost thoughtlessly, the Onceler began to map out possibilities in his mind; if strawberry plants were to be planted here, they ought to arrange the rows running parallel to the river so it would be easier on the harvesters. Irrigation would be more difficult, since the land was basically one huge slope and gravity would cause the water to run downward into the river. They would have to install a sprinkler system, perhaps one which could be gradually rolled down the incline throughout the course of a typical harvesting day. They could use the spare materials from the old system….

The Onceler shook his head sharply, feeling a slice of pain go through his heart as he realized where his hopeless thoughts were taking him. It was not that simple. It could not be done so easily. What about the company's lack of investors, the absence of new, factory-farm-ready plants, and besides that, the fact that all of the harvesters had gone? As desperate as the Onceler was to believe that something could be salvaged, he knew that nothing could possibly go forward without these critical pieces of the puzzle. As it was, his puzzle wasn't even halfway complete, and he would be a fool to dream otherwise. He _had_ been a fool. But he could not afford to be one any longer.

Suddenly the Onceler realized that he was walking up the hill alone. He swung around in surprise and saw that Audrey and Pipsqueak had stopped several steps behind him, and were watching him patiently from beside a singular, gnarled tree which he hadn't even noticed. The tips of his ears turned red as he tripped back over to them, mumbling something about "Lost in thought…." Audrey smiled and set Pipsqueak down, reaching into the basket on his arm and drawing out the old, faded blanket she had packed. The Onceler placed the basket on the ground and helped her spread the blanket within the perimeters of the tree's shadow. Although it was twisted on the bottom, it wore a coat of green leaves across its top which provided its trunk with protection from the sun. The Onceler smiled as Pipsqueak attempted to tackle the picnic basket, pulling the little bear up to sit on his shoulder. "Not yet, Pip. In a second."

In a rush of copper-gold, Audrey swung herself to the ground and propped her back up against the trunk, digging into the basket and arranging things around the blanket. The Onceler sat down beside her and commenced to search for the marshmallows. "Well, it's not exactly a traditional pastoral view, but you were right- it is much better to be outside the manor. I hadn't even realized it until now…."

Audrey smiled and leaned gently over the blanket, scooping up some of the tilled earth at the edge of its folds. She let it crumble in her fingers and brought it closer to her face, first examining its intricacies and then breathing in its scent. "The earth is good," she announced, pouring it back onto the ground.

"Yes…." The Onceler bit his lip as he finally found the marshmallows, not sure what he was supposed to say in reply to this. The earth may be good, but it wasn't just the earth…. The next second, this was driven from his mind as he looked up and noticed Audrey staring off across the slope with a strange, tremulous look upon her face. "Audrey….?" he asked, abandoning the marshmallows to Pipsqueak and moving a bit closer to the red-haired girl. "Are you all right?"

"What? Oh yes, fine, I'm fine. Let's have some food." The young woman said all of this entirely too quickly to be believable.

The Onceler furrowed his brow and shook his head. "Audrey, what's the matter? You looked….very sad just now."

"Oh no, I didn't. I'm not. It's just that I….well…." Audrey paused and swept a piece of hair behind her ears, curling her knees up to her chest. "The last night I was out here was when I was turning over the soil in Springtime….with everyone."

"By everyone, you mean….the other harvesters?"

"My community." Audrey nodded, pursing her lips quietly. "I miss them. They were like my family, and it's just so strange, being here without them….and knowing that they'll never come back. We're never going to live out there again, like we did before. Now that it's over, I can't help but feel like….like I should have appreciated those times with them more, while they lasted." She sighed and stared down at the tips of her shoes. "But, you know. There's nothing I can do about _that._"

The Onceler bit his lip, his stomache giving an unpleasant lurch. Once again, she spoke without anger in her voice or accusation in her eyes, but even so, he knew that this was a situation directly caused by his carelessness. Audrey must have felt exactly the way he had at first when she had still been living down in the field houses; the last living resident inside an abandoned and forsaken place. Which made him wonder all the more exactly why she had stayed. Why hadn't she moved on with the rest of the harvesters? They were migrant workers, after all. Moving on was what they did to survive. "It must've been….really nice to live out there. Beautiful scenery…." he mumbled, unsure of why he was even talking. He knew that he couldn't relate to Audrey's experiences.

Audrey gave him a swift look from underneath her raised eyebrow. "I'm not going to sugar-coat it, Mr. Onceler. Migrant life is hard. It's a hard way to live. In fact, it barely permits you to "live." We do some of the most back-breaking work in the country, and we don't even get paid minimum wage. Nobody has health insurance. It's hard for us to keep up in school when we don't live in the same place year-round. The work is unstable and relies entirely too much upon the fluctuations of the economy. And if that's not enough, everybody overlooks us. Migrant life is not _really nice._ But, even so….the people were. That's why I miss them. I wish I could have met them in different circumstances, but as fate goes, I suppose I'm just glad to have met them at all." Audrey sighed and leaned further back against the tree trunk, smiling at Pipsqueak as he ran up to her side and chirped obliviously.

The Onceler sat up straighter, aware that he was being mildly told off. Sheepishly, he murmured, "What….what were they like? Your friends. Your community."

Audrey smiled in that same tremulous, nostalgic way. "They were good people," she said in a voice which left no room for doubt. "We only really came together as a community within the last three years or so. Before that, we were just a bunch of people wandering around, passing through, trying to hang onto what little we had. But when we became El Valle de las Fresas, I tell you, we really started getting things done. We still had next to nothing in terms of wealth, but we managed to do together what we couldn't have done on our own. We got our own secondhand bus to take our children to school, and we set up intergenerational mentoring programs and continuing education and community funds. We helped people with special skills set up small businesses, mostly online, and we had our own little economy going on between here and the town. And we-"

"Wait, wait. What's….that thing you said. El Valle….?"

"Valle de las Fresas. That's what we called ourselves, the field workers' housing area. It means Valley of the Strawberries in English. We were more than fifty percent Hispanic, you know, so we had a community vote and decided that the name sounded better in Spanish than in English. We had a sign and everything."

"And you had all this….all this stuff going on? Because I had no idea about any of this," the Onceler stated, looking over at Audrey a bit incredulously. He had never been informed that they had established their own community out in the berry fields. The few moments of thought which he had ever spent on his harvesters back when Onceler Fields had been running, he had never seen them as anything other than….harvesters. Picking strawberries, that was what they did. He had never imagined them doing other things, being other people. At least not until he had met Audrey. He suddenly wondered if they'd had a covert painting club out there as well.

"Well, it was all informal. Nothing official was ever filed on any sort of record. We just made these agreements amongst ourselves, and kept to them every Spring and summer. In the fall and winter we would go our separate ways, and come next Spring we'd return again. Even though we spent half the year away from here, this-" Audrey patted the ground, "this was where home was."

The Onceler blinked in confusion. It felt so strange to learn about everything that had been happening right under his nose after it was already over, already ended. How had he not seen any of this? Had he really been _that_ submerged in his work? "But, I don't understand…." he pressed forward. "Why didn't you establish the community publically? Officially? It would have gained you more recognition, for sure, and I just might have liked to know that there was this- this Valle de Fresas thing set up on my land."

Audrey smiled placatingly at him. "We would have been pretty hard to miss for anyone who was outside the manor regularly," she stated, inclining her head toward the hills behind them. "All of the people who worked in the packing plant knew. And so did most of the servants in your manor. But you know, you were….never really around. We knew _of_ you, of course. We had a name for you, too." She brought her hand up to her mouth to hide another freckled smile. "We called you Capitán Abstraído. Captain Oblivious."

The Onceler choked on his breath. "You did-but- really?" he asked, not sure how he ought to feel about this. He had been called much worse things within the course of the past few weeks, but he hadn't even been aware of this particular epithet until now.

"It wasn't that we disliked you or anything," Audrey explained, beginning to fish an apple out of the forgotten picnic basket. "We didn't _know_ you at all. And we called you Captain Oblivious because….well, you didn't bother to know us. Who we were, how we lived, why we did what we did….you really weren't plugged in to that part of your company at all. You didn't know anything about what went on in the fields. We'd just get these random orders from time to time, _Mr._ _Onceler says to do this,_ or _Mr. Onceler wants that._ O'Hare was the man who we had to deal with on a face-to-face basis. Don't even get me started on _him,_" Audrey declared, pulling her sun hat down over her face with a flourish.

The Onceler felt like pulling his own hat over his head as well. He flushed, drawing in a deep breath of soil-tasting air. "I'm….I'm sorry about that. All of it. I know it's too late now, and I know talk is cheap, but looking back on everything….I realize that I should have paid far more attention to my land and to the people working it. If I had, maybe this complete disaster could have been avoided." He bit his lip and glanced over at the copper-haired girl looking gently up at him. "But Audrey, why didn't you guys ever form an official community out there? I'm sure I would have noticed you if I had known that you were, you know, organizing yourselves." _Whether or not I would have allowed it, that we won't discuss,_ he thought privately, thinking back regretfully on the person he had been.

Audrey shook her head matter-of-factly. "We couldn't have gone the official route. It would have been too dangerous for our stability. Almost all of our Hispanic workers were from outside the country, and most were not here legally. If they fell, we all fell. That's why-"

If the Onceler had been standing, he would have tripped and fallen over at this point. He yanked his hat back up and gawked at Audrey. "Just a- wait, wait a- _what?_ You can't be serious."

"I am completely serious," Audrey replied, bringing her legs back down and crossing them meditative-style in front of her body. "Statistically speaking, this shouldn't surprise you. Illegal immigrants, people without documentation of citizenship in this country, tend to congregate in the lowest-paying jobs with the least amount of oversight involved. It's the only way for them to work and be safe. Surely you must have realized that migrant work would attract them."

"But you _knew?_" the Onceler demanded, driving straight at the central point burning in his mind. "You _all _knew that about half of you didn't have papers? And _nobody_ said anything?"

"Well, to put it bluntly, no." Audrey stated calmly. "We didn't really care. We were a community, and-"

"But you can't just _do_ that. You can't!" the Onceler insisted, scooting closer to the unashamed redhead. "You're not _allowed _to just let them in like that. _I'm_ not allowed to employ illegal workers here! Do you have _any_ idea what the public would say if they found out that about half my harvesters were non-citizens? I'll give you a hint! It would sound a lot like _blah, blah, unpatriotic, blah,_ _blah, xenophobia, blah, blah, taxes!_ As if I haven't already had enough bad publicity! And I'll tell you another thing-!"

"Mr. Onceler! Mr. Onceler, _calm down,_" Audrey demanded, gripping his shoulder steadily with her rough, tanned hand. "Your fears are unfounded. No one is going to find out. First of all, we're certainly not going to tell. And secondly, the law states only that you are not allowed to _knowingly_ employ undocumented workers. Which you haven't. You had no idea about any of this. Captain Oblivious, remember? Your….general aloofness has had its uses over all these years."

Without knowing he was going to do it, the Onceler closed his eyes and groaned, letting his bones go slack and lowering himself down onto his back. He lay on top of the blanket, mind spinning like a carved top. Could not even one thing remain the way he'd thought it had been? O'Hare had not been honest, his family had not been loyal, the pesticides had not been safe, and now his workers had not even been citizens! What was next? The Onceler could not decide whether he should be angry with Audrey or not. Apparently she and the entire _fresas_ community had defied the law in order to keep themselves together, which was definitely a bad business practice. However, it had had absolutely nothing to do with the company's ultimate demise. He was to blame for that, at the expense of everyone else. Still undecided, he opened his eyes and stared curiously up into Audrey's green orbs. The young girl was looking patiently down at him, and it occurred to the Onceler that she must have not only planned this conversation but anticipated his reaction. And right now, her eyes knew what his next question would be.

"Why did you do it? All of you….what made you decide to live that way? You're a citizen, aren't you?" he asked Audrey, and she nodded. "Wasn't it awfully risky for half of you to just ignore the laws of your country? What if you'd been found out?"

Audrey shook her head, reaching out her hand to pat the head of Pipsqueak as he trundled across the Onceler's line of vision. The little bear seemed to sense the more serious atmosphere around the two humans, for he curled up silently in the crook of the Onceler's arm and proceeded to gaze intently at Audrey, as though he could understand her. She stared thoughtfully out the across the fields before continuing. "First of all, it wasn't nearly as risky for us. You want to talk about risky, you ought to have seen how the undocumented families had to live their lives. And secondly….we all chose to ignore the law together, because it was the only way that we could live in peace. We were so tired of fighting and being terrorized, and we just-."

"Terrorized? What?" the Onceler blurted out, sitting up again automatically. "What are you talking about? Who was terrorizing you?"

Audrey sighed. "Back before we became a cohesive community, we went through somewhat of a….trial by fire, shall we say. Literal fire, actually. At its culmination, Onceler Fields was almost destroyed over the course of just one night, and all because we couldn't figure out a way to trust each other across race and nationality. In the end, we had to make a decision, and we decided to start completely over. Everything new. If we hadn't done that, then you wouldn't be here today, Mr. Onceler, and neither would I. Onceler Fields wouldn't have had a chance to even get off the ground. Of course, you didn't know about any of this at the time it was happening, since you were always working up at the manor…."

"Will you tell me now?" the Onceler questioned, staring into Audrey's concern-filled eyes. "I want to know. I should have known back then, but I was….irresponsible. I couldn't see past my own nose, and it was always buried in my bank book, anyway."

Audrey snorted in assent, and Pipsqueak hooted and poked the tall, lanky man in his side. Even so, the Onceler sat up straighter. For some reason he felt comfortable with admitting his failures to Audrey, especially now that she was admitting this long, deep secret to him. He wanted to know more about it, her choice, her friends, _valle de las fresas,_ everything. He realized now that although he had never seen her, she had always been there, living this vibrant, tenacious, incredible life right outside his own front door. "I mean….I know that it's kind of stupid to be finding out all of these things after the end has already come. But I can't turn back time. This is the best I can do. So….I want to hear the story." Slowly he moved closer to Audrey, coming to rest his back against the tree's gnarled trunk beside her. "Please?"

Audrey nodded slowly, her copper hair washed by the patches of sun that had slipped through the leaves above, glimmering. She turned her head to look up at him. "All right. I suppose somebody might as well know….exactly why _el valle_ was so important to us all. It began for me when I first came here to work, back when you were just a young entrepreneur, about to harvest your first crop…."

**Next chapter: What happened to Audrey's community in the past while the Onceler was off being Captain Oblivious, and how will it affect the present? Is there hope for a new beginning? Find out next time! And thanks for reading! **


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